Problems in the analysis of requirements often lead to failures when developing software systems. This problem is nowadays being faced by requirements engineering. The early involvement of all kinds of stakeholders in the development of such a system and a structured process to elicitate and analyse requirements have made it a crucial factor as a first step in software development. The increasing complexity of modern softwaresystems though leads to a rising amount of information which has to be dealt with during analysis. Without the support of appropriate tools this would be almost impossible to do. Especially in bigger projects, which tend to be spatially distributed, an effective requirements engineering could not be implemented without this kind of support. Today there is a wide range of tools dealing with this matter. They have been in use since some time now and, in their most recent versions, realize the most important aspects of requirements engineering. Within the scope of this thesis some of these tools will be analysed, focussing on both the major functionalities concerning the management of requirements and the repository of these tools. The results of this analyis will be integrated into a reference model.

Currently more than 850 biological databases exist. The majority of biological knowledge is not in these databases but rather contained as free text in scientific literature. For systems biology tasks it is often necessary to integrate and extract data from heterogeneous databases and free text as well as to analyse the information in the context of experimental data. ONDEX is an integration framework which aims to address these challenges by combining features of database integration, text mining and sequence analysis with methods for graph-based data analysis and visualisation. The main topics of this diploma thesis are the redesign of the ONDEX backend, the development of a data exchange format, the development of a query environment and the allocation of Web services for data integration, data exchange and queries. These Web services allow backend workflow control from both local and remote workstations.